


yellow arrow high

by louisandthealien



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Hiking, M/M, Strangers to Lovers, Travel, Writer Louis, they hike the camino de santiago
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 02:05:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15962366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louisandthealien/pseuds/louisandthealien
Summary: There are a thousand and some yellow arrows marking the way on the Camino De Santiago, the 800 km hiking trail spreading from Saint Jean Pierre de Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Somewhere around kilometer 500, in the tiniest of hostels outside of the city of Burgos, Louis meets Harry with a blister on every toe and clothes that haven't been washed a week.Harry meets Louis with boots that are not his and the sunniest of smiles.





	yellow arrow high

**Author's Note:**

> PLS DONT BE DISAPPOINTED! This is a WIP. I know. I'm sorry
> 
> I've got some free time at the moment, and I'll be real: I just want the insta-feedback of fic writing so that I can take the energy and hopefully turn it into MORE writing. I've been stuck with academic stuff and play writing for a while, and want to get back to short stories and my novel.
> 
> Also, it's almost one year since I hiked the Camino and I miss it (and the people) more than anything.

“I think I might’ve stolen someone’s boots.”

Louis’ fingers falter where they had been picking through the triple-lock knot on his own laces. Head still bowed low, he lifts just eyes his confusion. “Excuse me?”

There’s a boy- a man- sitting across from him, blinking sheepishly at the hiking boots next to his sock clad feet. Beside him on the hostel bench sits a suspiciously tidy pack, no sweat stains lining the straps, no crumpled Smart Water bottle littering the pockets. There’s a white shell with a red cross- Saint James’ cross- strapped to one of the straps, and Louis knows without asking that the boy- _the man-_ started walking only just today.

“These aren’t my boots,” he repeats, looking up to meet Louis’ eyes. He flexes his outstretched feet, wincing.“No wonder my toes hurt like hell.” He smiles when Louis cringes in sympathy. “I’m Harry, by the way.”

There are a thousand and some yellow arrows marking the way on the Camino De Santiago, the 800 km hiking trail spreading from Saint Jean Pierre de Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Somewhere around kilometer 500, in the tiniest of hostels outside of the city of Burgos, Louis meets Harry with a blister on every toe and clothes that haven't been washed a week.

Harry meets Louis with boots that are not his and the sunniest of smiles.

“How the hell did you manage to do that?” Louis asks, laughing in disbelief. He turns back to the knots in his laces and works both sets free. He moans a little in relief when he pulls his feet out, and Harry laughs in return, shaking his head.

“It was dark in the hostel this morning!” he says, like that justifies anything. “And I stayed in the municipal- there must’ve been a least two hundred sets of boots down in the lobby.”

Louis grimaces. He isn’t sure what’s worse: having your shoes stolen two-thirds of the way through a thru-hike or putting your feet into shoes that a stranger has most likely worn- sweaty, unwashed feet and all- for at least sixteen days straight. He settles for, “That’s… horrifying. On so many levels.”

Harry shrugs, like he’s long accepted his fate, and Louis stands and grabs his own trail runners, making to shove them onto the metal shoe-rack by the window. He pauses, glancing back to make sure Harry is watching, and pointedly places them on the bottom shelf, as far away as possible from all the other hikers’ shoes. Harry sticks out his tongue in retaliation, and Louis thinks: he’s sort of cute, isn’t he?

It all goes from there.

☀︎☀︎☀︎

There’s nowhere for Harry to buy new shoes in the village they’ve stopped in, so Louis lends him the pair of Te-Va sandals he’d packed as town shoes because that’s just what you do on the Camino, he thinks. Someone needs help: you help them. “Pilgrims” helping “pilgrims.”

It has nothing to do with the way Harry asks him, easy as anything, if Louis wants to come help him explore the singular street that comprises the village of Hornillos in search of new shoes, as if a new store will magically appear amongst the windswept tiendas and house fronts. It has nothing to do with the way Harry turns to him after they’ve exhausted their nonexistent options, lazy grin, palms turned to the sky, _c’est la vie,_ if he wants to go drink wine, even though it’s only mid afternoon. It has nothing to do with any of that because this- strangers, helping, _wine-_ that’s just _what you do_ on the Camino.

Hornillos is so small there’s only a single restaurant. It’s set up outside the owner’s front door, just three tiny tables and a few chairs. “So, why are you walking?” Harry asks, and Louis knows that he’s asking because that’s just _what you do_ here, now, thirty kilometers from one city and fifty five until the next. You ask _why,_ and every person you meet has a _because._

When Harry smiles, his teeth are stained from the one euro wine, and Louis wonders if he’s ever looked like this before- too small Te-Va’s, plum purple teeth. Sun burnt nose. Beaming eyes. He wonders what he looks like himself. If it’s apparent that this is the first time in his adult life he’s let himself grow his beard past a professional scruff.

“Just… you know,” Louis says. “Just to see if I can.”

He knows that Harry knows as well as him that nobody hikes 800 kilometers _just to see if they can_ , but he doesn’t call him on it.

Instead, he says what Louis suspected. “I’m just here for two weeks. I did the beginning last year- San Jean Pierre de Port to Burgos. Next year, I’ll pick up wherever I leave off.” He lifts his wine to his lips and adds before he drinks, “I’m not really a pilgrim.” He looks abashed, as if he’s half-expecting Louis to whip out a rosary. His gaze tips down, and he takes a long pull of wine. When he looks back up, even his lips are stained a deep, dark purple.

“I’m not either,” Louis offers. “I didn’t even know who Saint James was before this trip. Or why he has his own fucking pilgrimage.”

He leaves out the bit about not knowing until he was physically _here,_ on the Camino, about how he hadn’t done a drop of research before buying a plane ticket to Paris, about how he’d arrived in San Jean with just a backpack and the vaguest of understandings of the fact that he was about to walk across Spain. It always sounds stupid, he thinks, in the face of people who planned their hike- their _pilgrimage-_ for years. In front of people, he sometimes thinks, who came here with an actual purpose.

Harry seems delighted at Louis’ admission. “You know, I didn’t either!” He leans forward in his seat as if latching onto a particularly good piece of gossip. “But a girl I met outside of Zubiri last year told me that part of the original pilgrimage included Saint James’ body going off the edge of a ship.” He gestures wildly with one hand, nearly upending the bottle of wine “Why the body was on a ship, I don’t know! But it supposedly washed up on shore weeks later, and it was covered in clams. Hence the shell symbol everyone carries around. And then, somehow, an angel put the body back on a ship and navigated it to a different port?”

He says the last bit like a question, and Louis has questions himself, the least of which being how in hell a shipwreck translated into a pilgrimage on foot, but in the space between Harry finishing the story and Louis opening his mouth to speak, the afternoon sun shifts, and a splash of light dances across Harry’s face. He squints and bats at the air, trying to block the light from blinding him, but Louis’ too lost to really register it.

  
Like a snap shot, the image of Harry’s face, half cast in sunshine, swims before him, and his stomach sinks, even as his mind does its best to record the details already slipping away- the light, his eyes, the quality of the air as it hovers between them- but it’s useless. The moment’s gone, and he doesn’t have his notebook.

  
Another trickle of inspiration lost.

“Hold on,” he says, digging into his pocket for his phone. He opens the notes app and starts to type, _Sunshine. New friends meeting at a cafe. The moment when you realize you want to get to know someone ?? That one second that stretches on for both eternity and a single heartbeat ?????_  

But it’s gone. The thought is gone.

He takes a deep breath, sets the phone face down on the table, and smiles ruefully up at Harry. “Sorry,” he says. “Just had an idea.”

Harry tugs his hair down from the bun on top of his head, sliding the rubber band over his wrist, and cocks his head. “Oh?” There’s a kink in his curls from where the hair was pulled tight, and he runs his hands through it, fighting at knots even as he stares expectantly across the table at Louis.

Of course Harry wouldn’t let it go. They’ve known each other for all of an hour, but Louis already somehow knows this. Can already tell that Harry’s the sort to invite himself into someone’s life and watch it all play out before him, interested in the sort of stuff that a person like Louis would normally keep to themselves, like-

“I write,” he finds himself saying, and it doesn’t feel like the first time he’s ever admitted it out loud. Harry blinks, lashes hitting the white under his eyes, right above where it melts into the pink of his sun-kissed cheekbones. “I had a moment of- you know. Inspiration or whatever.”

Harry kicks a Te-Va over his knee and leans back in his chair, arms crossing behind his head. “About the angel hauling Saint James’ clam body back to shore?”

Louis laughs. “Sure. Something like that.”

☀︎☀︎☀︎

They eat a pilgrim’s menu each at the hostel that night- spaghetti for starters, steak for seconds, and ice cream for dessert- famished after twenty kilometers, and Louis jokes with the other hikers sitting around the rickety dining room table that they feel like frauds, that there should be a separate _hiker’s_ menu- cheese and bread and maybe a piece of fruit, if they’re lucky- to sort out the riff raff such as themselves. The pilgrims from the hikers. The devout from the heathens. Those with a purpose from those that came because they were bored and lonely and-

He doesn’t say that, of course.

It’s fun and light, and everyone _oo’s_ and _ah’s_ at an English woman that had managed to not only hike a fully forty kilometers that day, but also attend Mass in the village before setting off. Harry stands and dramatically pours her the last glass of wine from the bottle on the table, announcing that she, as a _true_ pilgrim, deserves it.

It’s Louis seventeenth day on the Camino, and he’s found that, more often than not, he ends up walking alone, just he, his thoughts, and a few hundred Spotify playlists. But when Harry comes back from the bathroom that night, just as everyone in their eight-bed dorm room is settling in for the night, he beams at Louis, toothbrush in hand and asks, “So, what do you think? Up for forty tomorrow?” Like it’s already been decided. Like it’s already a given that they’ll stick together.

And maybe, Louis thinks to himself as he hoists himself up onto the top bunk, notebook in hand, maybe it already is.

☀︎☀︎☀︎

Apparently he was supposed to have brought ear plugs. He’s been told this at least twelve times since the first night, but Louis isn’t quite sure what he’s supposed to do about it now, out here in the middle of nowhere, so he walks himself into the ground, drinks a bottle of wine before bed, and hopes that’s enough to keep him asleep amidst the snores and shuffling of everyone sleeping around him.

This does nothing, unfortunately, to block out the 4 AM alarm of the asshole bunking below him.

Louis pulls his sweatshirt up over his head, ducking his chin against his chest, and silently screams. His feet crack in protest when he wiggles his toes, waking up the pervasive ache that’s taken up permanent residence over every inch of his body, and he knows, just _knows,_ that today is going to be a long day.

Once the first person starts moving, it’s an uphill fight against everyone else in the room: the rustling of packs, the first stifled groans as someone tries to stand up. It’s useless now, trying to fall back asleep, so Louis pushes himself to elbows and reminds himself: You Want To Be Here. It’s sort of a daily ritual, and strangely enough, barely a lie.

☀︎☀︎☀︎

“Hola!”

The voice comes from behind, bright and cheery, and even though it’s only 6 AM, too early for conversation, Louis finds himself breaking gait, pivoting to a backwards walk without a thought, as if the balls of his feet weren’t cramping with every step.

“Harry,” he says in surprise. The last he’d seen, Harry and his bright pink ear plugs had been nestled serenely in his sleeping bag. “Are you-” he squints, leaning in like Harry isn’t just a step away. “Are you wearing socks as mittens?”

Harry pouts, eyes bright. “I didn’t know it’d be so fucking cold in the mornings!”

Louis glances down at his feet. “And I’m sure the Te-Vas don’t help.”

“No,” Harry agrees. He points a foot demurely. “But my toes don’t feel like they’re being smashed off, so. Thank you.”

This is the point in the conversation where Louis normally smiles, nods, tosses out a, _“Buen Camino!”_ and hikes on. He has a dozen of these little encounters throughout the day- small snatches of conversation here, a joke or complaint there- before he always moves on, alone.

Harry falls into pace beside him.

“So, who the hell set that 4 AM alarm?” he asks.

They walk on together into the dawn.

☀︎☀︎☀︎

If Louis were to be writing a story about his hike- which he isn’t, because that’s _cliche_ , and if everything else in his life has to be a cliche (the breakup, the moping, the desperate attempt at a spirit journey, a la Cheryl Strayed), he refuses to write one. But if he _were,_ he imagines the summary would be something like this:

_Louis, a young, sad twenty-something books a flight to Paris, France on a whim after reading an article about the Camino de Santiago, a long distance hiking trail through Spain. He’s never hiked a day in his life, but, convinced that there has to be more to life, he sets off on an adventure full of endurance, courage, and life. Seventeen days into his thirty day journey, he meets Harry, and the real adventure begins._

_But he isn't writing that story. He’s not writing any story. His notebook sits completely untouched in its waterproof bag, somewhere towards the bottom of his pack._

A new bullet in the note’s app, however, tapped out quickly before bed the night before, sits unfinished:

 

  * __Strangers to friends?__


  * ~~_Friends to lovers?_~~



 

☀︎☀︎☀︎

**Author's Note:**

> I know this is short! I'm sorry. Thank you if you read that itty, bitty bit. More updates extremely soon.


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